In recent years, with the introduction of various types of automated equipment in the medical field, labor saving of inspection work has been processed. In hospital examination, hospitalized patient's and outpatient's examination specimens are gathered in each department in the hospital and processed collectively in the laboratory. The inspection items for each specimen are conveyed from the doctor to the inspection room using an online information processing system, and the inspection result is reported online from the examination room to the doctor.
Preprocessing, such as centrifugation, unplugging, dispensing and the like are performed with respect to most of the specimens to be inspected, such as blood and urine, and the preprocessing time accounts for a large proportion of the total inspection work time.
As described above, there are several processing in the preprocessing of the inspection process, but the content of the preprocessing differs depending on the target inspection type, for example, the urine inspection does not require centrifugation. With respect to the inspection target type specimen that requires to be centrifuged, after the centrifugation is performed, the unplugging and the dispensing are performed. The dispensing is processing for creating a child specimen from a parent specimen. For example, a plurality of child specimens obtained by the dispensing can be simultaneously conveyed to a plurality of analyzers connected to the system online. In addition, the dispensing also causes the child specimen to be conveyed with the child specimen having the same barcode as that of the parent specimen out to a sorting tray in order to perform inspection with an off-line analyzer which is not connected to the system. The specimen to which all of the processing processes have been completed is accommodated in a storage module.
The specimen inspection automation systems are generally introduced in facilities with a relatively large scale, and usually hundreds to thousands of specimens are processed in one day. In addition, in large facilities, in order to perform various inspections, such as biochemical inspection, immunological inspection, coagulation inspection, and hematology inspection, a plurality of specimens are collected from one patient. Therefore, specimen carriers for carrying specimens inside the specimen inspection automation system need to be prepared the corresponding number in order to perform the above-described processing smoothly.
In PTL 1, disclosed is a specimen inspection automation system which includes a plurality of loop conveying paths for conveying an empty holder and is capable of supplying the empty holder without delay.